Keith Richards' Guitar String Gauges

Both on and off stage, hardly any musician compares to that quintessential, glitz-and-guitar bad-boy persona of Keith Richards. The antics of the Rolling Stones' guitarist are famed to be, well, as crazy as they are creative—the mad energy of which you can bet starts from some custom guitar string gauges.

Addition by Subtraction

Richards' specialty guitar string set – like the legend himself – is equal parts folksy, fanatical, and ferocious.

His gauges start at a medium-tensioned .011 and .015 on the 1st and 2nd strings, running up into an unwound .018 and rounding off with a deeper .30 and 042. That's right—Keith only plays with 5 strings.

Keith Richards' Custom Guitar String Gauges: .011 - .015 - .018p - .030 - .042

Richards has long experimented with various tunings and ranges. Early on, Keith used his Gibson Hummingbird in open D and E. This steadily reworked into his now infamous G-chord tuning, the likes of which are the heartbeat behind some of the Stones' greatest hits: G - D - G - B - D

While you can play open G tuning with all six strings (Just tune the 6th string to D), having the lowest string be the fifth of the open chord can create some muddiness in the lower register—and in Keith's world there isn't any room for that.

Sidenote: Richards was also a notorious fan of Nashville tuning – a technique where the bottom four strings are swapped out for thin gauges to produce a higher-pitched chord range.

Satisfying the sound

We could go on and on in terms of Richards' guitar building blocks. The real question remains how these custom gauges amped up the man's remarkable riffs, sliding chords, and vigorous – sometimes spastic – chord positions.

The balance between the lower string removal and the sliding G progressions all build the kind of bursting, brooding melodies of songs like "Satisfaction" and "Brown Sugar." The open G tuning is especially prominent in Richards' notorious three-finger style—just try tuning to it and you won't be able to help cutting into Stones-esque riffs.

Undoubtedly this playing style would be much harder to accomplish if he were just tuning a standard string set to open G, instead of balancing out the tuning with the proper string gauges to achieve even playability and output across the fretboard.

If you want to try and emulate Keith's unique style, the first place to start is by copying his constant use of hammer-ons and pull-offs. To get started, try this advice from Gibson (you'll need to tune to open G, of course):

"Let’s take a look at “Brown Sugar.” The first chord is a high G, so moves to the 12^th fret and put your index finger across the bottom five strings. Put your middle finger on the 13^th fret on the second (B) string from the bottom and place your third finger on the 14^th fret at the fourth (D) string from the bottom. Strike that chord once with those fingers pinning the strings and rapidly lift your middle and fourth fingers and strike the one-fingered chord. Those are the first two chords of “Brown Sugar.” Then, using the same strings, slide the three fingered chord position you’ve just used to the fifth fret, and then to the eighth fret. And now you’ve got the intro to “Brown Sugar” and a grip on the foundation of Richards’ style.

Simple as it seems, that manner of three-fingered guitar playing is at the core of many of Richards’ best compositions. Move from fret to fret and keeping working the basic changes of blues and blues-based tunes you know and you’ll get fluid fast. Start using your index finger to bend strings as you hold down chords, or the hammer and pull, and your command will grow to include interesting nuances as well."

Maybe Richards' style was perfected as a result of his self-pronounced sleep schedule of only two nights a week. The not-so-secret drug regimens that most likely curtailed these productive all-nighters we'll just leave to the imagination. . .

Another key element in Keith's setup is custom heavy guitar picks, at a minimum around 1.0mm. And while Richards is pretty vocal about keeping guitar effects to a minimum, he has dabbled with a few different pedals over the years (Phasers, Crybaby Wahs, and Analog Delays among them).

Reveling in the riffs

Yet it's clearly the riff notoriety that delivers the one-two punch behind Richards' sound. In both electric and acoustic realms, Richards' generates positively momentous riffs. Think of the steering-wheel pounding catchiness of "Start Me Up" to the blurry, woozy drifts of "Beast of Burden." They're the sort of riffs the rest of us can only dream of.

Together, there is a formidable yet familiar set of modifications that can be chiseled at to achieve a Richards'-worthy sound. Beginning with echoing his custom guitar string gauges is certainly a great place to start – though the rest of Richards' *ahem* activities, you'll just have to customize for yourself.

Want to try a custom set of strings with Keith's exact gauges, or want to make some of your own modifications? Just head on over to our custom electric guitar strings page and select .011 - .015 - .018p - .030 - .042 from the drop-down menus. We recommend using the 6th string to nab a .052 to experiment with a low D, or if you like you can grab an extra .011 string. If you're dead-set on only using 5 strings, you can even save a few bucks by purchasing single electric guitar strings in each of these gauges instead.